An unhappy spam milestone

August 11, 2006

I have to finally admit it: I have stopped complaining about spam. More precisely, I've stopped writing and sending complaints about spam to the ISPs that they come from.

This is because I've pretty much given up hoping that a complaint to the theoretically responsible ISP is at all worth my time and will produce any meaningful results. I am tired of writing more or less form letters to tell ISPs that they have yet another phish spammer, yet another clueless free webmail provider spewing advance fee fraud, yet another advance fee fraud spam dropbox, etc etc etc.

The only thing I do these days when we get spam is block the sending source, following a one strike (at most) and you're out policy.

(Especially for webmail providers, because there is no hope that that they are going to get any better than their current wretched state. Indeed, if I had a decent list of free webmail providers, I would preemptively block pretty much all of them.)

I'm sad about it. There was a day when writing spam complaints did not feel like a futile waste of time, and it was not so long ago, and I would like that Internet back.

Written on 11 August 2006.
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Last modified: Fri Aug 11 15:38:14 2006
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